The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

With the spread of the bomb came a logic—a stab at a strategy—on how to deter its use in warfare. The logic involved convincing adversaries that you really would use the bomb in response to aggression; part of that involved convincing yourself that you would use it, which required building certain types of missiles, and devising certain plans, that would enable you to use them—and, before you knew it, a strategy to deter nuclear war became synonymous with a strategy to fight nuclear war. And when crises arose, the logic encouraged, almost required, escalating the cycle of threats and counterthreats, just up to the point where deterrence and war converged, in order to maintain credibility. The compelling, and frightening, thing about the logic was that, once you bought into its premises, you fell into the rabbit hole; there seemed no exit. The presidents who fell deep into this hole, who faced the abyss where the logic led, avoided its end point—avoided war—by scrambling out of the hole, snapping out of the logic, like snapping out of a bad dream.